Truth and the Church in a Secular Age

Jasper, Wright, David Jasper, Jenny Wright

• Publisher: SCM Press
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780334058168
• eBook ISBN: 9780334058182
• Topic: Theologie & Religion
• Subtopic: Christliche Theologie

Exploring the place of Christianity, the Church and their claims to uphold the truth in an age of `post-truth', Truth and the Church in a Secular Age takes an approach both historical in its depth and contemporary in its concerns.

1. Truth and the Biblical Tradition

NICHOLAS TAYLOR

‘I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.’ (John 14:6)

Christians of most persuasions view Scripture as a repository of truth, but they differ as to the nature and authority of that truth. They differ also as to how truth is to be discerned. A further complication is that Christians do not agree the parameters of Scripture, or the relationship between the component parts of the biblical canon. Some consideration of the nature of Scripture is therefore needed, before issues to do with truth in the Bible can be discussed.

The nature of Scripture

It is widely assumed that the early Church inherited without question the Hebrew Scriptures now generally known as the Old Testament, to which Christian documents now termed the New Testament were added during the first century or so. We need to be aware that this is an over-simplification of a lengthy, complex, and contested process. By the first century ce the documents broadly known as the Old Testament were circulating in Hebrew and in Greek, with significant differences in the content of each: the Greek tradition included the books that Protestants know as the Apocrypha, as integral to the canon, not as an appended and liminal collection of ambiguous value; furthermore, the Greek texts are not simply a translation of the Hebrew, but represent in places quite divergent traditions.1 In addition there were the Aramaic Targumim, which extrapolated as well as translated the Hebrew texts.2 It was the Greek text, known as the Septuagint, which became definitive for Christianity in the Hellenistic world, until Jerome produced the Latin Vulgate in the late fourth century. In the meanwhile, Hebrew and especially Syriac texts formed the Scripture of Oriental Christians.3 It was not until the Reformation that the Hebrew text became normative for Western Protestant Christians, and formed the basis for most subsequent translations of the Old Testament into vernacular languages. While the early church condemned attempts by the second-century Marcion and others to repudiate the Old Testament,4 its parameters and contents, and its relationship to the New Testament, have since the earliest days of the church been matters of disagreement among Christians.5

The New Testament is, at least superficially, a much less complicated entity. Notwithstanding the divergent textual traditions,6 there is a recognized and agreed canon, at least among most Christian denominations. However, it was a far from uniform process over several centuries before such consensus was achieved.7 Jewish Christians revered gospels written in Hebrew or Aramaic, and repudiated the Pauline corpus, until the rise of Islam.8 Gnostic and other groups revered yet other gospels, books of apostolic actions, letters, and apocalypses attributed to various of the disciples of Jesus,9 and some of these continue to be received as Scripture among Oriental Christians. The consensus that was achieved among churches within the Roman Empire was premised upon the ascription of apostolic authorship and authority, much of which has been brought into question by subsequent Christian scholarship.10 Once the premise has been dismissed, the authority in defining Scripture is seen to have rested essentially with church leaders whose judgement has been questioned, not only on questions of attribution but also of theological and political agenda. Quite apart from whether other surviving ancient Christian writings may witness more or at least as authentically to the voice of the early church, it is profoundly problematic for some Protestant Christians that the canon was defined by the church of the third and fourth centuries rather than being self-evidently those books of divine authorship and inspiration.

Recognizing the complexity of the history of the development of the biblical canon requires that we recognize also that Scripture is the creation of the church, which accepted some documents and rejected others, as well as of the authors, editors, and compilers of those documents. It is therefore not merely naïve and simplistic to regard Scripture as ipsissima verba Dei, but an evasion of the Christian responsibility to discern within the received texts those doctrines, values, and truths which are of enduring authority and relevance for the church today. The Bible reflects and gives expression to human attempts to discern the way of God and to proclaim it, within a distinctive but broad and far from monolithic Judaeo-Christian tradition. Scripture functions within specific faith communities which have mutated quite significantly over the centuries, and live today in contexts and cultures far from the ancient societies in which their spiritual forebears grappled to discover the truth of God. For Anglicans/Episcopalians, the canon of Scripture was redefined at the Reformation, creating the anomalous category of Apocrypha, and elevating the Hebrew Masoretic text to the definitive basis for vernacular translations of the Old Testament. This did not settle how Scripture was to be interpreted and its authority appropriated in the life of the church, but it did establish some parameters of theological debate and critical engagement with the text in subsequent centuries. The perceived testimony of Scripture to divine truth is the basis of its authority in the life of the church, but complex issues of interpretation remain. To these we will return after exploring ways in which Scripture speaks of truth.

Truth in Scripture

Words generally rendered ‘true’, ‘truth’, or ‘truly’ in English occur quite frequently in the biblical literature. While in the majority of cases the Hebrew root ’mn and its derivative ’emet, or the Greek aletheia, are so translated, this does not imply that the semantic range of these words corresponds precisely, or that their respective meanings may not vary according to context, or have mutated over the centuries. Rather than a simple definition, we need to discern a complex range or cluster of meanings, which reflect the values of the cultures in which the biblical traditions were originally transmitted.

The Western, rationalist, definition of truth, articulated in the linguistic philosophy of Wittgenstein11 and Ayer,12 and implicit in the scientific rationalism of Popper13 and Kuhn,14 has its foundations in the logic of the European Enlightenment, with its tenuous roots in Hellenistic philosophy. The notion of truth as objective reality, which human scientific and rational endeavours seek to discover and describe, within whatever limitations, is not entirely unconnected with biblical notions, in that both regard truth as in some way ideal and transcendent. Nevertheless, the biblical quest for truth is founded upon rather different principles. However widely the biblical tradition testifies to human endeavours to discover truth, truth is not merely abstract theory or the object of intellectual labour, but a quality of God. Far from being objective knowledge, truth is to be found only in and through divine revelation. Truth can therefore be known only in relationship with God. Furthermore, this would be a very incomplete and inadequate abstraction of the biblical conceptualization of truth, and it is of limited value in addressing the often quite cynical ways in which the rhetoric of truth is manipulated in postmodern discourse.

In order to make some contribution to appreciation of the complexities, and the richness, of the concept of truth reflected, and occasionally articulated, in the Christian Scriptures, I will treat briefly the words used in the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament. It will become clear that the notion is essentially theological, and indeed theocentric, describing a divine attribute reflec...

Table of contents

• Copyright information
• Contents
• Contributors
• Foreword by the Most Revd Mark Strange
• Introduction
• 1. Truth and the Biblical Tradition
• 2. The Origins of Truth in Philosophy, Theology and Theory
• 3. Seeing As: Wittgenstein’s Approach to Truth
• 4. Truth and Public Theology
• 5. Tangling the Fibres of the Threefold Cord: Truth and the Anglican Tradition
• 6. Liturgy as a Repository of Truth
• 7. Truth and Experience: Prayer and Ascetic Practice
• 8. Rudolf Otto: Truth and the Holy
• 9. Truth, Non-Truth and Reality in the Pastoral Context
• 10. Sciences and Truth: A Scientist’s View
• 11. Sciences and Truths: A Theologian’s View
• 12. Today’s Church and the Politics of Post-Truth
• Afterword